"Wonder Woman has such an interesting cultural origin – she was designed by this Harvard-educated psychologist named William Moulton Marston as propaganda for his theories that the world would be a much better place if men just submitted utterly to women. Which is a fairly radical theory now, and yet became a mainstream cultural success during World War II."

"I think it has a lot to do with Lynda [Carter]’s performance. There’s just something… She’s stunningly beautiful, she’s empowered, she’s attractive without being too sexy. There’s just a sort of all-American, beautiful, soothing, maternal quality to her. She’s what Wonder Woman should be. She encompasses everything great and powerful about being a woman, and Lynda took it all seriously. There was no judging the fact that she was playing a super hero. She took it as seriously as if she was playing Florence Nightingale or Eleanor Roosevelt. It was a role and she threw herself into it, and it shows. It’s what makes it have so much impact and such timelessness. People tend to get spoiled reading those lists of the fifty super hero movies coming out in the next five years. Back in the day, until Tim Burton’s Batman changed everything, super hero stuff was few and far between, and most of it erred on the side of being really silly. So to have something that spoke to a character in a way that was fun, accessible and respectful, that really stood out and it continues to do so—it’s one of the best performances in super hero film and television."

"Diana is raised on Paradise Island, where her mother and her Amazon sisters have created a healthy and loving society. They worship the goddesses of Greek myth—in the early stories, Aphrodite, goddess of love, defined in opposition to Ares, the god of war; in later stories, a collection of Greek goddesses including Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, and Hestia. The goddesses grant Diana her amazing powers. (In some versions Hermes is involved, and in one that I can remember, Hercules; but usually it is one or more goddesses.) The Amazons are trained warriors, quite capable of fighting to protect their home and innocent people. But they prefer love to war, and when possible rehabilitate their enemies instead of killing them. (They have a whole island dedicated to it!) These are the people who, along with Hippolyta, taught Diana their ways.

None of this is an accident. William Moulton Marston, who created Wonder Woman, was, for all his personal idiosyncrasies, a feminist. (Ah, another overloaded word!) He believed in the value of women, a value not based on men. He wanted to depict an image of what women might accomplish if not subject to oppression, discrimination, and male supremacist assumptions. Wonder Woman was not simply a story of One Exceptional Woman who is as good as men—that’s a sexist stereotype exemplified in the early superhero teams (Justice Society of America, Justice League of America, Teen Titans, Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men) which, at their inception, each had several male members with varying personal characteristics, and one female. No, Wonder Woman was about more: the value of women and of female relationships, unimpeded by male authority. Even Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls, often seen as comic relief, were a formidable group of young women: brave, loyal, and willing to fight for the good.

This was a radical idea at the time, and was certainly not reflected in any other mainstream comic book. It was partially hidden behind some of the weirdness of Marston’s Wonder Woman stories, with their emphasis on dominance, submissions, being getting chained up, and the like, but it was central to his vision for the character.

And the idea is still important and meaningful today. Some people may insist that we actually do live in a post-feminist world, where men and women are judged on the same criteria and have equal opportunity in all things. But it’s not the case—not in the world, not in the U.S.A., and certainly not within the context of DC comics.

In our community, we simplify Superman and Batman into the LIGHT and the DARK sides of our nature. Wonder Woman encompasses BOTH. COMPLETELY maternal and caring, and all the BEST qualities a person could have… but I’ve seen her at WAR with an AXE in her hand. And that’s where the sweetness STOPS.

Active or ambitious women were not only rare but often evil. Wonder Woman flipped this paradigm by embodying the strength, assertiveness, and independence usually associated with bad girls and villains in a positive heroic light. The Golden Age Wonder Woman was a blatant rejection of the good girl/bad girl binary and even offered a critique of the good girl role.

— Tim Hanley,Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine

Even bullying was important to Wonder Woman, and in Sensation Comics #23 she stopped a gang who were picking on a young boy, showed the head bully the error of his ways and learned about his home situation, spoke to his father about his abusive tendencies, and then helped the father get a job in a wartime factory. She always took the time to get to the root of the problem.

— Tim Hanley,Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine

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